Germaine Greer is notorious among trans women as one of the
feminist vigilantes who went on an anti-transsexual rampage in the 1980’s and
1990’s. Along with feminist academic
Janice Raymond,
author of the notorious book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the
She-Male, Greer went on a witch-hunt
to find and “out” stealthy postop women.

Raymond and Greer (and their ideological followers) especially targeted
trans women who had successfully obtained good employment. They went after these
women without remorse, in efforts to publicly defame them, cost them their livelihoods, and force them
into social marginalization (which Raymond and Greer apparently thought they
deserved).

Physicist Rachel
Padman of Cambridge University became one of Greer’s
special targets in 1996 (Greer ruthlessly outed and attacked Rachel in the UK tabloids). Fortunately, Rachel was
really well-liked at Cambridge, and was able
to survive Greer’s wrath.

Although most stealthy women in academe and the professions
escaped such exposure, fear of being exposed by the Raymond-Greer witch-hunt
kept many successful trans women in deep stealth
during the 1980’s and 1990’s. As a result, the stories of many
successful transitions in those decades never became public.

However, at the turn of the 21st Century ever larger numbers of trans women
finally began finding each other via the internet each year – and began collectively freeing themselves of the
fear, shame, embarrassment and guilt that so many transphobes such as Greer
had heaped on them in the past. As a result, our successes are
rapidly becoming much more visible now.

Nevertheless, Germaine Greer continues to viciously defame
trans women even now, as we see below, and her books are still widely read and
taken quite seriously in "women's studies" programs in many universities.

What is it that drives Greer to attack trans women in such
a hate-filled, remorseless manner? Whatever it is, it must arise at very
deep and personal level. Could it be envy that drives her to do this? Could she
just hate it that some trans women may be enjoying deeply satisfying lives in
ways she can never hope to? By her utterances and by all appearances
Greer
seems to be a very angry, unsatisfied, unfulfilled person - so maybe that's what's
going on, eh?

"The only way a man can get rid of healthy genitals is to
say that he is convinced that he is a woman. Then another man will remove them
and gladly. In order to justify sex-change surgery a new disorder called gender
dysphoria has come into being. The disease has no biological marker; its
presence is discerned by a history of inappropriately gendered behaviour, social
disability and affective disorder. . . .

Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to
recognize as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves
castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a
non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries
transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe
women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that manmade women be
accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction
that women are defective males. The biological truth is the opposite; all
biologists know that males are defective females. Though external genitalia are
the expression of the chromosomal defect, their removal will not alter the
chromosomal fact, any more than removal of the tails of puppies will produce a
tailless breed. "Sex-change operations" can only be carried out in Swift's
Laputa. As Dwight D. Billings and Robert Urban argued in 1982:

Transsexualism is a relational process sustained in medical
practice and marketed in public testimony ... The legitimization,
rationalization and commodification of sex-change operations have produced an
identity category—transsexual—for a diverse group of sexual deviants and victims
of severe gender role distress.

As sufferers from gender role distress themselves, women
must sympathize with transsexuals but a feminist must argue that the treatment
for gender role distress is not mutilation of the sufferer but radical change of
gender roles. Throughout their history women who could not carry out their
prescribed gender roles have suffered all kinds of ghastly gynecological
procedures and, like transsexuals, they have been grateful to their abusers.
Women could hardly now condone the elaborate mutilations practised on
individuals of both sexes, even though the victims argue that such mutilations
are their right.

No one ever asked women if they recognized sex-change males
as belonging to their sex or considered whether being obliged to accept MTF
transsexuals as women was at all damaging to their identity or self-esteem. As
far as anyone could tell, women did not mind calling sex-change males "she."
Perhaps this development should have been resisted, because it was part of the
definition of the female as "other," as simply the "not-male." Femaleness is not
the other side of the Rorschach blot of maleness, but a sex of its own, with a
sexuality of its own and a whole spectrum of possible expressions, many of which
take no account of maleness at all. Woman is not placed on earth for the use of
man any more than men are placed on earth for the use of women. Both could do
without each other if it were not for the pesky business of sexual reproduction.
. . .

A good-hearted woman is not supposed to mind that her sex
is the catch-all for all cases of gender ambiguity, but her tolerance of
spurious femaleness, her consent to treat it as if it is the same as her own
gender identity weakens her claim to have a sex of her own and tacitly supports
the Freudian stereotype of women as incomplete beings defined by their lack of a
penis. Women's lack of choosiness about who may be called a woman strengthens
the impression that women do not see their sex as quite real, and suggests that
perhaps they too identify themselves as the not-male, the other, any other.
. .
.

The transsexual is identified as such solely on his/her own
script, which can be as learned as any sex-typed behaviour and as editorialized
as autobiographies usually are. The lack of insight that MTF transsexu¬als
usually show about the extent of their acceptance as females should be an
indication that their behaviour is less rational than it seems. There is a
witness to the transsexual's script, a witness who is never consulted. She is
the person who built the transsexual's body of her own flesh and brought it up
as her son or daughter, the transsexual's worst enemy, his/her mother.
Whatever else it is gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother. When a
man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in
Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it, proving at a stroke
that there was nothing to her. His intentions are no more honourable than any
female impersonator's; his achievement is to gag all those who would call his
bluff. When he forces his way into the few private spaces women may enjoy and
shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him
with threats and hate mail, he does as rapists have always done."